A Very Palletable Task

It was a glorious sunny afternoon for our starter session at Danesmead Wood. FOUR brand new runners came along to join the fun, let's give some big cheers for Eloise, Ben, Bethan and Aidan!

The first actual task was to find all the pallets and carry them, along with wheelbarrows of tools, into the Wood. Tough enough without me taking everyone on an extra loop of the woodland path.

It's nice to see the whole wood!

From there we split into three groups to tackle our three tasks:

• Building a (very fancy) bug hotel using the pallets
• Planting around 50 small trees and 11 big fruit trees
• Raking and digging over a snowberry-engulfed area ready for it to be transformed into a wildflower meadow

Jude had sketched what she wanted to bug hotel to look like and Tom seemed confident with what she was asking so I assigned him as the Bug Hotel Project Manager.

It's going to be a "des res", this hotel! Jude (who is so down with the kids)

The tree planters were already digging holes and new runner Aidan was being introduced to the wondrous tool that is the mattock. Meanwhile, the rest of the snowberry clearance squad were struggling to unwrap a package of forks and remove the tip protectors.

The tree planting team were digging holes in very specific places and even had wooden stakes with alphabetical codes so they knew which type of tree needed to go in their hole.

All the pears should stay together, plums at this end!

In one hour all the trees had been planted, the rooty snowberry pile was even more gigantic and the bug hotel was entirely constructed minus the roof. We stopped for a quick cuppa courtesy of Jude and then gathered all the tools up before a little fitness session.

Max wondered how long the fitness session would take and estimated it might take exactly that long for their team to finish the roof.

We completed a few run/sprint repeats of Millennium Bridge and the steps with lunges and squats in between, and additional hanging and pressing exercises for those who weren't up for the running.

Max was spot on with his timing as the bug hotel builders did indeed just finish in time for the end!

Great work everybody!